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Tuesday, July 29, 2014

This Week in Palestine SOCIAL MEDIA: How do we move from “preaching to the choir” to communication with a wider audience that leads to more understanding, empathy, and behaviours in concert with our plight for self-determination and an end to the Israeli occupation?

Would Social Media Bring Freedom to Palestine? Saleem Alhabash, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Public Relations and Social Media Michigan State University

I
am a social scientist who is enthusiastic about the social media
phenomenon and how it affects our lives. I use lab and field experiments
to test what motivates people to share, like, and comment on social
media posts and how engagement with social media can lead to offline
behaviours. Applying my research to my homeland, I argue that
interaction on social media related to the Palestine question could
potentially lead to changes in attitudes and behaviours toward Palestine
and the Palestinians.Social Media: A Global Village?In the mid-1960s, Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan1 talked about technology as a force unifying the world into a global village,
where people communicate freely and things that happen in one part of
the world are seen or heard in another. However, the fact that people
are on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram does not make them connected and
does not remove physical and mental borders among nations. Social media
are still very segregated. We interact with people who are like us,
despite the possibility of having diverse online networks. It becomes
difficult, then, to infiltrate people’s networks with content that is
incongruent with their values and norms. Even when it happens, the
chances of them engaging with such content are slim. Taking into
consideration negative stereotypes of Palestinians, pro-Palestinian
social media content is deemed incongruent, thus leading us to a case of
“preaching to the choir,” instead of changing how others perceive us as
a nation and as a cause.

Over
the past decade, social media have experienced exponential global
growth. Facebook has 1.28 billion users, each with an average of 338
Facebook friends.7-8 There are 255 million active Twitter users, who
send 500 million tweets per day.9 More than a billion Internet users
visit YouTube each month, where they watch six billion hours of video
monthly, and upload 100 hours of video every single minute.10
Palestinians have the opportunity to leverage social media in order to
engage people in online interaction that will lead to empathy and
support for ending the Occupation.

How
do we move from “preaching to the choir” to communication with a wider
audience that leads to more understanding, empathy, and behaviours in
concert with our plight for self-determination and an end to the Israeli
occupation? It will not be easy. To master this art, we need to
understand how people use social media and the resulting effects. But
first, we need to understand human nature.

Return to BasicsAs
humans, we respond to everything in our environment in one of two basic
ways: we either approach stimuli or we avoid stimuli. Our central
nervous system is guided by the appetitive motivational system, which
drives us to seek out pleasurable stimuli such as food and sex, and the
aversive motivational system that drives us to avoid negative stimuli,
such as danger so that we run away from a roaring lion. Understanding
this trait of human nature is essential to realizing why people click on
a link, hit the “like” button, share a post, or comment on something
someone else has said on social media. When communicating with others,
the key is making it relevant enough to activate their approach
motivation, which guides both online and offline behaviours. A study in
20122 found that positive articles in the New York Times were
shared more often than negative ones. My own research showed that
college students were more willing to like, comment, and share
anti-cyberbullying posts if they had a positive rather than a negative
tone.3 This is precisely why images of babies and kittens get more
likes, shares, and Retweets. Pleasant images activate pleasant emotions,
and people like to share pleasant things. I’m not suggesting we start
posting pictures of cats to garner support for Palestine, yet knowing
about this dynamic is essential to getting people more engaged online. In
2007, I conducted a month-long experiment, where I asked Palestinian
and American young adults to interact on Facebook. In addition to
discussing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, participants asked each
other about dating norms, food, school, and family relationships. Pretty
mundane, right? Yet after one month of such “mundane” interactions,
both the Palestinian group and the American group had changed their
perceptions about the other for the better. Bottom line: the experiment
was a success. Participants were able to humanize the other side, which
resulted in viewing them favourably. In another study, American college
students played the roles of the Palestinian President or the Israeli
Prime Minister in PeaceMaker, a video-game simulation of the
conflict. Results from two studies showed that playing the role of the
Palestinian President for only 20 minutes led to positive changes in
attitudes and stereotypes toward Palestinians. A
sceptic might very well say that these interactions are meaningless,
considering the complexity of the conflict. That might be true in some
cases, yet additional studies I’ve conducted show that expressing
intentions to “like,” share, and comment on a Facebook status update
(regardless of the topic) nearly doubles the chances that a person would
express intentions to engage in relevant offline behaviours.4, 5How do
we, then, get people engaged online with our cause? Creating a “Dragonfly Effect”In their book, The Dragonfly Effect,6
Aaker and Smith argue that to create successful social media campaigns,
you need to identify a clear goal, figure out how to grab people’s
attention, engage them with the content, and invite them to take action.
I often see posts on my Facebook newsfeed related to Palestine that
have no clear goal. We need to think more strategically about what kind
of impact we want to have with the information we share about Palestine.
We need to provide content that not only grabs people’s attention, but
also engages them. To engage people and motivate them to take action, we
need to tell a story, to put a human face on our just cause, to
generate empathy (bloody and gory pictures don’t generate empathy; they
create anger and push people away). Above all we must remain authentic.
We need to provide a call to action beyond sheer awareness-raising. It’s
not about telling people what to do; it’s about offering mechanisms for
them to act upon their online engagement. To answer the question I posed in the title of this article, I can only say: it depends.
Social media offer amazing opportunities to share our perspectives
without the restrictions of mainstream media gatekeepers. We have access
to a virtual space where anyone can talk to everyone, where everyone
can fulfil his/her responsibility to champion our rights and induce
change, even if it’s just one person at a time. This is the time when
one person could make a difference. The world awaits our call to action!Saleem
Alhabash is an assistant professor of public relations and social media
at Michigan State University’s Department of Advertising + Public
Relations and Department of Media and Information. He completed his B.A.
in Journalism and Political Science from Birzeit University, and his
M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism.
Away from research, he enjoys baking batches of baklawa and
muttabaq-consistently crowd-pleasers-to share with friends and
colleagues.